Peter Beverloo

With 563 commits at WebKit and 854 at Chromium, totalling up to 1,407 changes, it has been a busy week again. Highlights include addition of the Media Source API and support for binary Web Socket messages.

Dominic Mazzoni landed quite some accessibility improvements in Chromium for Windows. Dozens of roles and states have been corrected for a variety of elements, support for tables featuring row and column spans has been improved, and support for range inputs and live regions has been added. Finally, an onVolumeChange event has been added to the Accessibility Extension API. Mac work will follow soon.

Network related error messages in Web Inspector’s console will now link to the respective request in the Network panel. Furthermore, the window won’t grow anymore on every close-open cycle.

For folks using Web Sockets, WebKit now supports both receiving binary messages (as Blobs and ArrayBuffers) and sending binary messages (also as Blobs and ArrayBuffers). This is a huge step forward in supporting the new protocol. Meanwhile, Aaron Colwell implemented the Media Source API within WebKit, making it possible to dynamically append data to video playback.

“Furthermore, the window won’t grow anymore on every close-open cycle.”

FINALLY! Will it still grow when Ctrl+Tabbing around? I hope that’s included in this.

Border images look awesome! I was just trying them out for a site a few weeks ago, but was frustrated about lack of support. Good to see they’re finally in Chrome.

“If Chrome’s taking more than 25 seconds to close, it will now deliberately crash itself.”

….huh, interesting way to solve that problem I guess.

Jon Rimmer

September 6, 2011 at 10:00 am

Ooh, I didn’t know about the “fill” keyword that’s been added to the border-image-slice spec. That solves my main complaint with Webkit’s original implementation, that you couldn’t combine it with CSS gradients to create a gradient border. This should make it a lot easier to generate nice pure-CSS buttons and panels.

Binyamin

February 14, 2012 at 2:29 pm

Since -webkit-flex-flow has been added in Chrome 15, probably all its properties must be supported too.